The Tipping Point
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference is the debut book by Malcolm Gladwell, first published by Little Brown in 2000. The three rules[edit] Malcolm Gladwell describes the "three rules of epidemics" (or the three "agents of change") in the tipping points of epidemics. The Law of the Few[edit] "The Law of the Few", or, as Malcolm Gladwell states, "The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts".[3] According to Malcolm Gladwell, economists call this the "80/20 Principle, which is the idea that in any situation roughly 80 percent of the 'work' will be done by 20 percent of the participants".[4] (see Pareto Principle) These people are described in the following ways: Connectors are the people in a community who know large numbers of people and who are in the habit of making introductions. Salesmen are "persuaders", charismatic people with powerful negotiation skills.
How Many Friends Does One Person Need?: Amazon.de: Robin Dunbar: Englische Bücher
Validation of Dunbar's Number in Twitter Conversations
THE OPTIMAL SIZE OF A TERRORIST NETWORK
Distributed, dynamic terrorist networks cannot scale like hierarchical networks. The same network design that makes them resiliant against attack puts absolute limits on their size. If so, what are those limits? A good starting point is to look at limits to group size within peaceful online communities on which we have extensive data -- terrorist networks are essentially geographically dispersed online communities. His analysis (replete with examples) shows that there is a gradual fall-off in effectiveness at 80 members, with an absolute fall-off at 150 members. Al Qaeda may have been able to grow much larger than this when it ran physical training camps in Afghanistan. This leads us to optimal group size, which according to Chris Allen's online group analysis, can be seen at two levels: both small and medium sized. This chasm (between 9-25 members) nicely matches the problem period in the development of terrorist and guerrilla networks that studies of guerrilla groups refer to.
The ‘Path’ to Social Network Serenity Is Lined With 50 Friends | Epicenter
Three ideas lurk behind Path, a new social service that launches Monday as an iPhone app. As CEO Dave Morin explains it, the first two are the products of scientific research. As a former Facebook exec — Morin was responsible for the Facebook platform that supported apps from outside developers — he was drawn to the work of evolutionary anthropologist R.I.M. Dunbar, whose work on the primate neocortex suggested that brain size limits the number of close connections. This applies to grooming cliques among apes and Internet social networks among humans. Is a ‘Favored Fifty’ the magic number for your Personal Network? This led Morin, who left Facebook early this year, to conclude that his new startup would put a limit on connections so that users would have “a quality network.” The second idea came from Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel-winning economist who has studied the nature of memories, particularly their relationship to happiness. This leads to the third idea behind Path.
Security, Group Size, and the Human Brain
If the size of your company grows past 150 people, it's time to get name badges. It's not that larger groups are somehow less secure, it's just that 150 is the cognitive limit to the number of people a human brain can maintain a coherent social relationship with. Primatologist Robin Dunbar derived this number by comparing neocortex -- the "thinking" part of the mammalian brain -- volume with the size of primate social groups. By analyzing data from 38 primate genera and extrapolating to the human neocortex size, he predicted a human "mean group size" of roughly 150. This number appears regularly in human society; it's the estimated size of a Neolithic farming village, the size at which Hittite settlements split, and the basic unit in professional armies from Roman times to the present day. Of course, badges aren't the only way to determine in-group/out-group status. Coherence can become a real problem once organizations get above about 150 in size. Tags: essays, psychology of security
Rule of 7: The Ideal Work Group Size | BNET
Last Updated Sep 28, 2010 12:18 PM EDT In the movie The Magnificent Seven, a group of crusty gunfighters led by Yul Brynner successfully protects a small Mexican village from desperadoes. The movie itself is a remake of Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. As it turns out, seven is a great number for not only forming an effective fictional fighting force, but also for task groups that use spreadsheets instead of swords to do their work. That's according to the new book Decide & Deliver: 5 Steps to Breakthrough Performance in Your Organization (Harvard Business Press). Once you've got 7 people in a group, each additional member reduces decision effectiveness by 10%, say the authors, Marcia W. Unsurprisingly, a group of 17 or more rarely makes a decision other than when to take a lunch break. Larger groups only seem to work when they adopt a strict set of governing policies, such as spelling out when a majority is needed to ratify a decision versus a plurality. © 2010 CBS Interactive Inc..
Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks (9780393041538): Mark Buchanan
